Health entrepreneur Rebekah Hall

Rebekah hall, 36, is the chief executive and co-founder of drinks company botanic lab. She is single and lives in london. I GREW up near Glastonbury and, from a young age, practised yoga with my mum. When I went to university, I carried that on, so I’ve always been interested in wellness — even before it was fashionable!

I wanted to work for myself, but I’m not from an entrepreneurial background. Instead, I started out in corporate finance, buying and selling businesses. It wasn’t long before I got fed up with not being involved in building something.

Approaching 30, I was bored and unhappy, which is often when people need to make a change.

I was introduced to the CEO of a luxury goods business. He told me: ‘You’re never going to be able to do the sort of job you want unless you start your own business.’

It was exactly what I needed to hear. I resigned that day and gave myself a break from work. I just wanted to give myself a chance to step out of the world I was in.

It was one of the best decisions I botanic lab’s Reset+, kola+ and Repair+ drinks, £3.99 each ever made — but also one of the hardest. For the first time in my life, I had no direction. I taught yoga and travelled a bit. I thought I’d made a huge mistake, but I had no excuse not to try to do something on my own.

Through my yoga business, I immersed myself in the health and wellbeing industry and came up with the idea of creating healthy drinks. There was an appetite for greater transparency in food and drink brands.

I met my co-founder Christophe Reissfelder on a yoga retreat I ran — he’s a chef and product-focused. I run the business. We started with cold-pressed juices, but have just launched a range of botanical tea drinks with no refined sugar and no artificial flavours or sweeteners.

Now we’re stocked by Waitrose, Sainsbury’s and Ocado, as well as restaurant chains such as All Bar One.

We have 15 employees and everyone is invested in our success.

People often think that to be an entrepreneur, you need an idea that’s going to change the world, but that wasn’t the case for me. The key thing was that my idea allowed me to meet this drive to build something and throw my passion into it — and I’ve finally done that.

botanic-lab.co.uk